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ALT.NET Seattle Day Two

Day two of ALT.NET is over and I’m already pooped (for you non-English
speakers, that means tired, not something else that might come to mind).

Once again, photos by our Chronicler, Brad
Wilson. As a
testament to how engaging the sessions were, there are a lot fewer
photos from day two in his
photostream.

The first session I went to was on the topic of Encouraging Open Source
in the .NET Space as seen above, which veered all over the place. Many
felt the industry is shifting towards more and more Open Source software
so those who can leverage that will be better off than those who can.

One interesting idea that came out of it was there’s a need for more
education regarding Open Source. For example, understanding licensing is
very challenging. It’d be great to have simple tools like a
compatibility matrix or a license chooser (ala Creative Commons license
generator).

Another interesting point tied into our TDD discussion later on in the
day related to the fact that for many shops, it doesn’t exist unless
Microsoft endorses it.

The next session I attended was “.NET/Mono on the Mac, Linux, and
iPhone” facilitated by the always entertaining Miguel De
Icaza and Joseph Hill. I’m quite certain that
everyone was there because they wanted to pull in $10,000 a day
writing the next Fart
app
for the iPhone using C#.

Later in the day, Karen
Liu (a PM on the Managed
Languages/IDE team), Euan
Garden (PM for
Visual Studio Test), and I (photo above) gave a wide ranging session on
TDD and Microsoft, which covered investments we’re making across
Developer Division to help make the experience for writing proper unit
tests better for developers such as ASP.NET
MVC, WPF’s
Model-View-ViewModel,
Visual Studio improvements, Silverlight, etc….

The focus of our efforts has been addressing the need for our tools and
frameworks to support all developers who write automated tests. But the
bar set by the expectations of a TDD developer is typically very high,
and by striving to meet those expectations, we feel all developers
benefit.

I showed off a few slides to set the context for what groups we’ve
talked to and what improvements we’re seeing start to happen for the
next wave of products.

Karen Liu gave a few demos of how Visual Studio 2010 greatly improves
the workflow for a test-first developer and Euan Garden led a discussion
about the Visual Studio unit testing framework.

We discussed where we’d all like to see Visual Studio take unit testing
in the future. There were quite a few voices who said they’d like to see
Visual Studio include something like
xUnit.NET, much in the same
way that ASP.NET MVC includes jQuery, because for the places where they
work, for better or worse, it doesn’t exist unless it’s part of Visual
Studio. This is a common theme I’ve heard when it comes to people
wanting to promote a development tool at their workplace for which
Microsoft does not have an alternative.

To illustrate this point, one person came up to me and told me he had
never used jQuery (and didn’t write a lot of JavaScript) until it was
included in ASP.NET
MVC
and now he’s very happily using jQuery with ASP.NET MVC.

To me, that’s a great testimonial for how leveraging Open Source in
smart ways can make customers happier.